


you're a lover, i'm a runner

by eponinethenardiers



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Death, Depression, F/M, I hate myself for this, So much angst, mentions of past drug use/addiction, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:33:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponinethenardiers/pseuds/eponinethenardiers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt: eponine has a job that requires traveling, and she's restless and won't commit. combeferre always waits for her</p>
<p>Éponine’s a freelance photographer who can’t deal with the idea of Combeferre waiting up for her, so she cuts ties and leaves him without a word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're a lover, i'm a runner

It took two months for her to stop writing.

He still waits, tearing through every envelope that fell through the door just in case he could catch a glimpse of her familiar crude scrawl. He tells himself he doesn’t feel disappointed anymore when he finds nothing, but it’s a fresh wound every time. He aches for her, for her smile, her laugh, the light freckles on her shoulder and the thick scar snaking its way underneath her rib. He aches to feel the calloused sandpaper skin of her hand as they intertwine their fingers; he aches for her breath on his face when he wakes up beside her, her eyes fluttering with dreams as she sleeps. 

He knows she’s moved on, and he knows he’s supposed to have moved on as well. She didn’t hesitate in telling him that he didn’t deserve to sit here and wait for her when she’s in a new country every month. He tried to tell her she was wrong, that any time waiting for her was more than he deserved,  _she_  was more than he deserved. She wouldn’t hear it. He still remembers the way she kissed away the tear on his cheek, refusing to meet his eyes as she walked out the door for the last time.

He dreams of her. He can’t escape a night without the echo of her smile taunting him, the shadow of her lurking in every corner. For the night, it comforts him, the illusion that she’s still here, that she’s still wrapped in his arms where no one can hurt them; but when the dawn comes the illusion shatters, and the wound reopens.

_"This isn’t about us," she had promised him. "It’s just too inconvenient, it’s not fair to you to be here alone when I’m never here."_

_"No," he corrected her softly, unable to look at her. "This is entirely about you. This is about you being afraid of taking a chance."_

_"Combeferre—"_

_"I’m not angry. If this is what you want, then I’lll accept that without a fight. Just don’t lie to me. I know you too well for that."_

He tries not to think about where she is or what she’s doing. Last time he heard from her, she was in Prague as a photographer for some fashion company Cosette worked with. She had sounded so happy in her last letter, but distant. The words were vague, not mentioning the people she had met or the moments she had laughed. It was a report, not a correspondence.

He should have known it was goodbye.

He can’t stop himself from worrying, even though she’d hate him for it. Is she making enough money to support herself? Is she staying away from drugs? Is she dead in an alleyway, olive skin turned to porcelain, violet threads of veins sticking through her skin like tattoos? Do her eyes still sparkle with life and energy, with that blazing ferocity that left him breathless?

She sent Marius and Cosette a Christmas card three months ago, peppered with greetings and well-wishes, devoid of any information. She sent Courfeyrac €300 for him to put aside in the bank account she started for Gavroche as soon as she pulled herself out of the gutter. She sent him nothing. 

It seemed twisted, how she became a ghost in his life yet was burned so brightly into his mind. No one dared mention her name anymore, even Gavroche avoided him to spare his feelings. Paris felt empty without her, any imprint of her life vanished with the plane she had boarded nearly a year ago. They’re trying to help him forget her. It will never work.

* * *

 

On the first anniversary of her departure, Courfeyrac and Grantaire drag him to the shadiest nightclub he would approve of, throwing drinks down his throat as he tries not to let his memories overwhelm him. Everything in the building reminds him of her. The couple dancing next to them is a vision of the way they had been at Marius and Cosette’s wedding, her laughter filling the ballroom as he shuffled awkwardly and apologised profusely as he stepped on her toes. The girl at the bar is as tall as she was, with the skeletal skinniness that she had never shaken even after she climbed out of poverty. A boy flirting with Courfeyrac had her deeply tanned skin, spotted with freckles across the shoulders and collarbone.

He slips out of a backdoor the moment neither Courfeyrac nor Grantaire were looking, collapsing against the grimy brick. Even the smoke-filled air feels better filling his lungs than the moist, electrified atmosphere in the club. He can’t deal with so much stimulation at once. Not tonight. Tonight, he needs to be alone. 

At first he thought he had imagined it, alcohol entwining itself with desperation to stab a fresh wound through his heart. It couldn’t have been  _her_  glossy black hair whipping itself around her as she turned the corner; it couldn’t have been  _her_  favourite army green tank top, not _her_  impossibly tight jeans and laced up combat boots. No. It must be some other woman, some cruel doppleganger punishing him when he’s at his weakest. 

Still, he finds himself walking towards the glimpse of hope, feet picking up speed with every step until soon he’s sprinting, chasing after her like a starving man seeing an open banquet. He knocks over tourists, pedestrians, bicyclists, but he doesn’t care. Curses and objections litter themselves in his wake, but he doesn’t care. He only cares about the girl with the impossibly long black hair and thickly-soled combat boots disappearing on the horizons, growing dimmer and fainter with the light.

He catches up to her while she’s walking through an alleyway, her back still turned to him even though she could surely hear his panting.

"Éponine," he breaths, her name like velvet on his lips after so many months of its absence. She halts where she stands, the muscles in her back tensing at the sound of his voice.

"Leave me alone," she commands softly, keeping her back to him.

"Please, Éponine,” he begs, his heart echoing in his ears with his adrenaline. She sighs, finally turning towards him.

She looks exactly how she did a year ago and yet a world different. She seems fuller, brighter, like she had aged five years rather than one. She had even finally gained some weight, a more rounded quality to her razor-sharp bones jutting from her skin.

_Being alone suits her_ , he realises with a pang. 

Underneath it all, it was still his Éponine. Her hair was still cut in choppy layers all the way down to her hips, unkempt and ragged. She still had the two cursive names tattooed under each collarbone _—’Gavroche’_ and _‘Azelma’,_ permanently inked on her skin. Her eyes were still greyer than storm clouds, piercing into him even when her expression was soft. 

"Hey," she says coolly, keeping the ten-foot distance between them.

"Hi."

The air between them seems to freeze, thick with tension as they stare shamelessly at one another.

"You cut your hair," she finally comments.

"You didn’t."

"I figured you’d hate me if I did."

He can’t help but smile at that, hope flickering in his chest. He had loved her hair more than anything, and if she let him, would spend hours braiding and playing with it, letting the silky strands slip through his fingers and curl around his wrists. Maybe her keeping it meant she was still holding onto them.

"When did you get back in town?" he asks, a part of him dreading her answer. If she had been back in the city for a while and had just been ignoring him, it meant she really was finished with him. For good.

"I only got in this morning," she confesses, chewing nervously on her lip as she gauges his face for a reaction. He exhales slowly, relief washing over him. 

"That’s good."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

They’re playing with each other _—_ analyzing every twitch of the muscles, studying every breath, reading every stance and position of every limb. This wasn’t a reunion, this was chess. 

"Are you seeing anyone?" he finally makes himself ask.

"We’re not getting back together."

"I was only making—"

"No you weren’t."

"So what if I wasn’t?" he finds himself asking, his voice growing stronger, angrier. "I didn’t even get a goodbye, Éponine, I got a ‘don’t wait up’ and a random end to all word from you. What, did you think I’d just forget about you?”

"Yes."

The honesty of the statement was a twist in the knife that seemed to be permanently lodged in his gut. She really believed he’d just forget her, that she would be a fling buried in the depths of his mind. When she said he didn’t deserve her, he never realized how much she had meant it.

Before he knows what he’s doing, his lips are pushing against hers, hands tangling in her hair as they stumble back against the wall. She eagerly reciprocates, scrabbling to get him closer to her, nails digging in to his back through his shirt. He forgets that she hasn’t spoken to him in ten months, that they’re in public, that he really  _really_  should not be doing this. He can hardly think of anything when she’s moaning into his mouth, her leg hitched around his waist.

Somehow they manage to stumble back to his apartment, his sense of responsibility forcing them out of the open alleyway and into a cab. He can practically the driver rolling his eyes at them, but he can’t really make himself care.

He loses himself in her, her cinnamon scent, her scarred yet silken skin, the heat of her breath and frantic lashing of her tongue against his. In return, she melts into him, letting the pain of the last year fall off of her as her lips form his name over and over again, making up for the months of silence. They forget where their own bodies end and the others’ begin, and for the first time in a year, they feel complete.

* * *

 

She’s gone when he wakes up. He knew she would be, but it doesn’t stop the swell of disappointment filling his chest, nearly pushing tears to his eyes. She would have never stayed in the city for long. He was a pit stop.

The pillow still smells of her, and he can hardly make himself lift his head from it. He wants to stay there forever, with the lingering ghost of her, for once not from the depths of his imagination. It feels like a dream, yet in every corner there seems to be painful evidence that she really had come back, and she had really left him. Again.

He doesn’t go to his classes for an entire week. He goes through his life in a stupor, unable to hear or see the world around him. Weight seems to fall off his bones, and no one can tell if it’s from lack of sleep or lack of food. Cosette tries to comfort him, Grantaire tries to get him drunk, Enjolras doesn’t yell at him when he skips meetings. It’s as if the world just knows to leave him be, let him grieve.

Slowly, his smile returns, though dampened. He pretends as if nothing as happened, throwing himself into school work and protests, letting the world he had shut out absorb him back into itself. With the passing months, he begins to heal.

He meets a girl at the Musain when he spills his tea all down her dress, three years after he had last seen  _her_.  _'Brigitte'_ , she introduces herself, flashing him a picture-perfect smile. She looks nothing like her, with golden hair falling only just past her shoulders, perfectly smooth ivory skin, and eyes a dull, ordinary blue. She wears floral dresses and listens to his every word, accepting everything he is without debate or mockery. She’s calm, collected, predictable, and everything  _she_  never was.

He sends her an invitation to their wedding. She doesn’t come. He’s not surprised.

He hears that now she’s found a permanent job in Italy, getting back into fashion photography. The thought makes him sigh with sadness, realizing she never did achieve her dream of photographing the homeless and starving, trying to get the underbelly of the world to the front pages. She had always hated fashion photography. Part of him hates Cosette for getting her into it in the first place.

His first child is born on the eighth anniversary of her departure. He can’t tell if nature is mocking or helping him, giving happiness to a day usually filled with sorrow. He tells Cosette and Marius to let her know about his son, tell her that she should come visit. She never does.

Gavroche says she found a boy somewhere in Australia. He’s a freelance journalist who works primarily in Europe, travelling just as much as she does. He wonders how that works. He wonders if that could have been him.

Brigitte never asks questions when he gets that far-off gaze, eyes weighted with grief as his memory takes control of him. She leaves him be, preferring not to know who she was replacing.

He’s in his mid-thirties the last time he ever hears of her. He’s taking his son to school, a spring in his step and a smile on his lips, blissfully ignorant.

He knows something’s horribly wrong the moment he sees Cosette standing in his front door, eyes red and puffy from crying. “I’m so sorry,” is all she says, and he knows.

No one’s quite sure how it happened. Some say drug overdose, but he refuses to believe she relapsed. She was too strong, too determined. Others say she did some investigative journalism on her own and got involved with the wrong people. When they don’t think he can hear them, the rest whisper  _suicide_.

They bury her back home, in Paris. He refuses to let her be buried back in Montfermeil. He claims it’s because she loved Paris too much, but he just wants her close to him. For the first time in fifteen years, she has to be close to him again.

He can’t cry at her funeral. He spent decades crying over her. He’s too numb for tears now.

He visits her grave every year on her birthday. He lays down tiger lillies, her favourite flowers, the flowers he brought her on their first date. Gavroche brings her daisies, but somehow they never run into each other. He knows the boy’s avoiding him, and if he were to be honest with himself, he was glad. He looked too much like her for him to be able to handle.

His hair begins to thin and grey on the edges, wrinkles deepen in his forehead. He watches his children go through school and eventually university, top of their classes. They have their father’s brains. He can’t help but imagine what they would look like with her dark skin, her pink lips, her spark blazing in their eyes. He loves them unconditionally, but they were not the children he ever thought he would have.

He stops visiting her grave when his knees are too weak to walk to the cemetery and his back is too fragile to decorate her grave. Every year on her birthday, guilt stabs through him with a vengeance. He doesn’t sleep those days, afraid of seeing her betrayed face in his dreams.

His last moments are peaceful, alone in his bed with his favourite book on his lap. He knows it’s happening, but he isn’t afraid. One last thought flickers in his mind before his eyes shut for the final time

_I’m fifty years late, but I’m finally following you_

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this nearly a year ago and I still wanna punch myself in the face for writing this


End file.
